Disk cloning hard drives with bad sectors

[Galdorf]

I know there are a few software packages that can do this fast, only one i know about is diskpatch anyone know of any other software?.

[Marius]

I know there are a few software packages that can do this fast, only one i know about is diskpatch anyone know of any other software?.
If you can get hold of Ghost (Dos version 8.5). Make a boot-disk and boot from that with (obviously) Ghost on it

[Galdorf]

Tried that it crashes when it hits errors diskpatch allows you to clone it skips errors fast and copies all good data i tried with acronis, norton ghost dos acronis does not crash but copy will take 22hrs that is too long.

It costs 160 bucks for disk patch just checking if there is something cheaper.

http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/products.htm

[Marius]

Tried that it crashes when it hits errors
I think you didnt set it right...There IS an option to "ignore" crc errors...just check ;)

[purple_minion]

There is G4L, PING, clonezilla, as well as SystemRescueCD using ddrescue command. All linux btw. Obviously with cloning you need at least the same drive size or bigger.

[stevenamills]

I thought this thread was worth reviving. I had a dying drive this week that was bad enough it blew up several of my standbys.

I use Image for Windows with some regularity, but never for this purpose. It has a built in installer for Bart's PE, so I installed it in UBCD4Win and gave it a go. It did a great job of skipping bad sectors and and creating an imagine on a netwrk drive. The restore was painless and the system is working now. Not fast but efficient. Fortunately the disk held up.

I would like to have tried the Recoversoft product, but, as I understand it, the clone feature only works to another drive (ie it won't create an image file) and it has difficulty "seeing" USB attached drives. Too expensive to try out.

I still want to try Ping and ddrescue, but my Linux skills are minimal.

Thought this info might be of some help.

Oh, diskpatch sounds interesting, but I see little about it.

[veedar]

DriveImageXML which is built into UBCD4Win will optionally skip bad sectors.

Let me second ddrescue run from a Linux boot CD. It's slower but will capture all possible data.

For resizing to a smaller disk check out FSA
http://www.fsarchiver.org/Main_Page
It's a Linux utility but operates on NTFS not sure if it handles bad sectors.

[14049752]

Rawcopy by Roadkil is fantastic for cloning failing hard drives. Sometimes it takes a while, but it's not unlike magic in how well it works. Works for EVERY os, because it ignores filesystems and such. If cloning to larger drives, you have to use something else to resize partitions, though.

[anonymous Mac Tech]

Rawcopy by Roadkil is fantastic for cloning failing hard drives. Sometimes it takes a while, but it's not unlike magic in how well it works. Works for EVERY os, because it ignores filesystems and such. If cloning to larger drives, you have to use something else to resize partitions, though.

Just skimming through this thread because I constantly deal with the frustration of getting disk images from failing drives as well. I just usually use disk utility in the Mac OS utilities or Carbon Copy Cloner. Can't say one is better than the other. But I will definitely check this out. Thanks for the tip!:)